


Replica

by vailkagami



Category: due South
Genre: Angst, Gen, implied suicidal thoughts, post-Vegas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-08
Updated: 2013-10-08
Packaged: 2017-12-28 19:34:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/995709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vailkagami/pseuds/vailkagami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Riv was more than a car, Vegas was more than a job, and Ray is something less than a person.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Replica

The third day after learning (from Welsh, no less) that Fraser is going to stay in Canada, Ray wants to get his car from whatever corner they carelessly left it at and go for a ride. Going nowhere. He doesn’t feel like returning home because it doesn’t feel like home anymore. He cannot sit at the dinner table with his mother and the kids and pretend. He cannot sit at his desk and listen to the good-natured teasing of co-workers who think he wants to know how fun the other guy was. But he can sit in the familiar cocoon of his car and drive and maybe feel like himself for a while, until he had to stop and get out, and maybe he won’t stop for a long time.

But he asks where it is with little hope that anyone actually knows or cares and learns that it’s at the bottom of Lake Michigan as a burnt out shell, and it’s Francesca who tells him, with that gleam in her eyes that speaks of payback for childhood sins and Serves You Well and a total lack of sympathy mixed with a lot of sisterly teasing, because she doesn’t get that she’s not his sister anymore.

Ray doesn’t say anything, he just goes away until he finds a place where he’s alone and then he sits and does nothing. Stares at some spot between the wall and the floor. He used to love his car. He needs it now, he thinks, because how else could he explain a grown man feeling like crying over a car? He didn’t cry over his first one, even though the first one had smelled like Ange and the hope of beating the odds; even though he had destroyed it himself, because of Fraser, for Fraser, and this one was only the third one, the replacement of the replacement, and it smelled of nothing but wet wolf and had been blown up by Fraser and a guy using Ray’s name.

Maybe Ray doesn’t feel like crying after all. Because he doesn’t. He feels like puking and he doesn’t do that either. He feels very alone and wouldn’t know what to do with company except lie.

He sits wherever he is for a long time because he doesn’t have anywhere to go. He breathes, even though he doesn’t quite remember how.

 

-

 

On the fourth day after learning (from Welsh) that Benny isn’t coming back, Ray moves into his new apartment. It’s small and shitty, but he doesn’t care. He took the first one he could get. His Ma doesn’t understand. She cried, and then she got angry, and then she cried some more. Ray listened and watched and wondered how people could do that, deal with other people all the time, people who had needs and expected you to meet them. He wanted to comfort her only because he knew the man he remembers being would have tried, but in the end he just left.

(He buried the man he remembers being in the desert and didn’t mourn, because why the fuck would Armando Langoustini cry for some Chicago cop stupid enough to take on his family?)

(Benny buried the man he remembered as his friend in Lake Michigan and didn’t mourn either.)

On the fifth sleepless night in a row he looks at himself in the bathroom mirror with a dismantled razor in his hands and thinks that he doesn’t blame Benny for leaving. Benny deserves happiness, which means he deserves Canada, and adventures in the wild with a guy who introduced himself as Ray Vecchio and sat at Ray’s desk and entertained Ray’s colleagues and drove Ray’s car. There was a stop sign involved, they said, and a car wash, and little yellow rubber ducks exploding in all directions. Apparently it was very funny.

Ray has a hard time facing the mirror, even though Armando doesn’t. He does it anyway, naked and pale and tired, with a new bullet wound to join old scars and a razor blade in his hands, because he wants to see if he can make it past the mask if he tries and find out something he needs to know.

He fails, since he can’t figure out which one is the mask and which the lie.

 

-

 

On the fifth day after learning (from Welsh) that the Mountie isn’t coming back, Ray stops on the way home and buys a lot alcohol. He doesn’t even care what kind; it’s the kind of stuff he had very consciously decided not to have anywhere near him until today. Walking into the store, walking out of the store, driving home in a car that preserved nothing, he doesn’t remember why he bothered. It doesn’t even feel like giving up.

On his sixth night without sleep, he has a fridge that contains no food but a lot of booze, a headache that won’t go away and doesn’t matter, and he still can’t remember how to breathe. Somewhere on the way to being very, very drunk, he tells himself that he’s glad Benny is gone. Ray has nothing to offer him.

His father used to drink a lot. His father was not a nice person when he was drunk, but then, he wasn’t a nice person, period. Ray remembers going through life with the goal of being something else, but Armando did more than just drink and he was worse. Compared to him, this is an improvement, Ray thinks as he drinks straight from the bottle and wonders if he should bother with the hangover.

 

-

 

Day six tastes like decay. Nothing is worse. Nothing is better. Ray closes his eyes to the afternoon sunlight and his lungs draw in air, one breath after another.

 

October 8th, 2013


End file.
